I guess I was lucky too. Because I grew up in an apartment building, that's where my friends were. I made some friends at school, too, but for the most part didn't see them outside of school.

I have no memory of cliques, mean girls, or any of that. I came home to my friends from the building, and when we hit our teens boys were added from neighboring houses and apartment buildings. It was the best group! I'm still in touch with many of them.

Here's my friend Pat (on the right) and me, vacationing with my family at Sag Harbor.

Not every female had those same experiences....so sorry that you did.

My school years are remembered with great warmth and fond memories. Sure, there were cliques, but it was very easy to associate freely among the different groups without problem.

Middle school seems to be the time & place in which girls display or experience the worst meanness of their lives.

& I once worked for a woman who hadn't moved past it!

There were "her girls" & then there were the rest of us, poor miserable outcasts that we were.
I didn't stay there long.

Going through it during school hours was bad enough;
I'd bet that there were/are suicides at boarding schools where this kind of thing isn't stopped.

Oh I had some nasty ones in my life during the grade school years! Actually, one nasty queen bee and the rest of us worker bees never knew who was going to be in the queen's favor or wrath that day until we stepped off the bus. If I think about it to long, I start wishing I could go back in time and knock that queen off her pedestal. Made me distrust females for a long time!

Was this fiction or real? My DD was in a boarding academy Jr/Sr year and Jr year was great, but SR year was not good for her because the clicks==and some of the were pastor's kids. This was a church academy. Most of the staff were great.

Lucky ladies who did not experience this common problem. (It had never dawned on me how awful it would be to have to LIVE with it day and night.)

Early in the book, two detectives are interviewing girls, one by one. The first girl is described: Long, ironed blond hair; fake tan; plucked eyebrows. Each of the next three: Ditto, ditto, ditto.

Wasn't there a tv movie like that?
Columbo or something?
where the "clique" girls all decided they wanted to raise their children together?

They wanted their children to all look alike, too, & since they were all blonde/blue eyes/etc, they picked one boy that they thought would make pretty babies & got him to "cooperate".

meant to say:
cool pic, alisande!
It looks like it should have been in Life Magazine, or Look, in the1960's, maybe in a story about the good life in America.

or maybe in a Coke or Pepsi ad!

This is a novel, but I found nothing false in the depiction of the girls in the school. It's not all about friction. There is also bonding, however much of that is in defense against other 'bonded' girls.

It's also sad. Regimented and religious boundaries are as focused on the girls' chastity as they are on education. This focus promotes an unnatural understanding of all tenderness, let alone a pure love. The result is girls who are repressed witches, while boys in the boy's school must perform their assigned roles as villains.

This stage of life is always difficult, but the confines of boarding schools appear to make it even more intense. If you don't believe that pre-adolescent and adolescent girls can be *terrifyingly* competitive, ask someone who teaches middle or high school. The same undercurrents exist in college sororities.

Does female/female competition ever end? Is it new, or a remnant of primate behavior?

I'm like the other ladies who have nothing but fond memories..There were always groups of friends that sort of hung out together but I don't remember any nastiness...

Sheesh, I don't think I'll be reading that book, lol.